Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”

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Most days, I post a resolution on Facebook. I need to post something, and since I don’t have cute cat videos, dear dog photos, or pithy thoughts that can be posted in the few words that most FB perusers can absorb in the few seconds they allow per post, I’ve been posting resolutions. Even if no one reads them, it’s a way of concentrating my thoughts on a particular area I need to work on that day, and it helps. Yesterday, for example, I knew I would have to be conciliatory and kind to someone I wasn’t feeling kindly toward, so I posted, “Today I will be . . . humanitary.” I couple of days ago, I needed to be firm and steadfast in a decision, and so I chose “staunch.”

At the beginning, I just chose one of the words from the word art I use as my cover photo for my profile — words such as playful, daring, intense, bold, whimsical, mysterious, legendary. But when I stumbled on the book, The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate by Eugene Ehrlich, I started using words that few people knew, words such as alcatory (depending on luck or chance), magniloquent (lofty in expression), veridical (truthful), cachinnate (laugh loudly). The odd thing is that most of the adjectives in those 192 pages were not exactly uplifting. As interesting as the words look, dysphoria, fractious, louche, purulent are not states to which I aspire.

It’s become something of a treasure hunt to discover hidden gems such as eupathy, which means a happy condition of the soul. Don’t we all strive to be eupathic? It gave me great pleasure to bring this jewel to light.

Today I discovered another wonderful word. Habromania — a kind of insanity in which there are delusions of a cheerful character or gaiety. [It comes from the Greek words habros meaning graceful or delicate and mainesthai to be mad] I don’t imagine that it’s a comfortable state since it is a form of insanity after all, and yet, those who have it would, by definition, be happy. David E. Kelley, the man responsible for Ally McBeal, seemed to like habromaniacs since he used them occasionally in the series. In one show, an old man was wonderfully happy, giving away his fortune to the dismay of his children. It wasn’t until the man’s wife died and he found himself unable to cry or even be sad at her passing that he allowed himself to be treated.

It seems to me our world could use a few more habromaniacs — people who are happy even though sanity seems to dictate misery.

It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, but the saying only holds true when referring to insane or destructive behaviors. In our normal lives, we constantly do the same thing over and over, expecting different results . . . and we get them. We rise at the same time each morning, eat the same breakfast, drive the same way to work, go to the same job, but we don’t expect each day to be exactly the same as the day before. It can’t be the same — there are too many variables.

In a closed system, perhaps, the saying would hold true, but since there are no closed systems, we normally get different results. Writers and other creative people experience this every day. We sit in the same place, pen in hand or fingers on the keyboard, and open our selves up to the creative process. Sometimes the words flow and sometimes they don’t. Athletes deal with differences in performance, sometimes they are in the zone and everything is perfect, and sometimes, though they do exactly the same thing as always, their performance is off.

This expectation of different results was the basis for alchemy. We picture the alchemists doing the same procedure repeatedly to perfect their experiment, but the truth is, they did the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way in the hope of getting different results. Sometimes everything came together as they hoped, and they got the desired results, transforming lead into gold or themselves into a higher form of life or atoms into energy. (Or so the legends say.)

Why would the alchemists expect different results by doing exactly the same thing? Because they knew they did not live in a closed system. The earth hurtles around the sun at 67,000 mph. The sun hurtles around the galaxy at 140 miles per second. The entire universe is also moving and expanding, so from one second to the next we are in a completely different place with a possibility of different factors. Add in more localized variables, such as humidity, temperature, sun spot activity and solar winds, and it would seem insane to do the same thing over and over again and expect the same results.

After my moment of happiness yesterday, when I could feel that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing (simply “being”), I decided to do the same thing again today. Not surprisingly, the results were different. I stood in the same place, repeated the same mantra (“I am happy”), felt the breeze and the heat, smelled the sun-warmed creosote bushes, inhaled the clean air. It was nice, and I felt peaceful, but there was no moment of clarity as there was yesterday. I truly did not expect the same results. I know about variables. The day was hotter, the sky a paler blue, no jackrabbit loped by but humans in their motorized vehicles were driving around disturbing the air currents and creating sound vibrations. I might not have slept as well as I had the previous night, or perhaps I’d dissipated my mystic energies in exercising before going for my walk, which I didn’t do yesterday. Still, it felt good standing in the desert, doing nothing but being, so I intend to do that very same thing over and over, expecting different results each time. And therein lies sanity.

Books by Pat Bertram

Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?

Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?